February 2008

Moving to Colorado

February 28, 2008

I recently wrote about closing my business and the failure of our product, FeedCraft. It may have sounded somewhat abrupt, but these were decisions that have been in the works for many months. The process of our moving started after deciding to close the business itself and reflecting on what our next steps were. After [...]

Closing EvolvePoint and FeedCraft

February 22, 2008

Last month I announced to all our FeedCraft customers that EvolvePoint would be shutting down the service. I’ll be writing more about why I think the product did not become as successful as planned; but regardless of the reasons, the economic realities made the decision inevitable. I founded EvolvePoint in 2004 initially performing management and [...]

Small Business Backup System Using Amazon S3

February 13, 2008

My friend Thomas Myer has a great article up on the Amazon Web Services Developer Connection on Building a Small Business Backup System Using Amazon S3. When you run a small business, you’re usually running too fast and hard to think about data backups. Then something terrible happens—a hardware failure, an employee or contractor gets [...]

Free Wifi at Starbucks with AT&T

February 12, 2008

There’s been a lot of buzz about Starbucks partnering with AT&T to offer two hours of free wifi with a purchase. Starbucks today announced a deal to offer AT&T WiFi service at more than 7,000 locations in the U.S. Starbucks card holders get up to two hours of free WiFi access per day; customers of [...]

Changing the name of your company

February 11, 2008

Pat Matthews writes about changing the name of Webmail.us to Mailtrust: “The first challenge in the naming process was coming to the realization that we needed to change our name. Even though we knew our name was flawed, we spent a lot of time, money, and energy building our brand over the years. And all [...]

Don’t send me calendars when all I want is respect

February 9, 2008

I was doing some cleanup around the house this weekend and finally got around to a large pile of junk mail sitting on the counter (you know you have one too). One of the items sitting there was a set of calendars and a form letter from the sales agent of the builder of my [...]

Customer experience in retail

February 8, 2008

I read that Circuit City, despite its troubles, was continuing its multi-quarter turnaround plan. Here’s my free advice to Circuit City – copy Best Buy. Yes, it’s quite simple advice. Just hang out at your local Best Buy (Circuit City management you may have noticed they’re everywhere now) and start taking notes. The last time [...]